Previously, a local presentation of Speak Peace came to Arapahoe County Community College. Speak Peace is a collaborative, international project between Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center and School of Art Galleries, and Soldiers’ Heart, a veterans’ return and healing organization. Vietnamese children’s paintings on peace and war have been collected and writers have responded to them.

The picture, Tears, is by Tran Quy An, age 13.

Here is my poem:

After Picasso

The trees are on fire and planes fly

like large black birds. The bombs

dropped are painted packets of blue.

Brother and sister and cat cry

with heads askew and tears

falling. They look out at us,

their arms raised up, yet this is

no Guernica. As Tran Quy An makes them,

the children are grieved but not surprised.

-Lynn Wagner

Guernica was begun by Picasso May 1, 1937 in response to the bombing of norther Spanish village by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces on 26 April 1937.